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Tutorial@BuildSys24 (Hangzhou!)

What is Playground and why does it matter?

Adoption of building apps in practice is slow for two safety reasons:

  1. Building managers DO NOT trust any third-party software

    • Third-party, unvetted, possibly buggy

    • May affect safety- and comfort-critical elements of building

  2. The inability of modern buildings to properly restrict an application’s permissions

    • Execution opaquely to the manager with unclear impact on the building state

    • Require extensive manual effort to oversee all potential effects

To bridge the gap, we introduce Playground, an open-source "safe" operating system (OS) abstraction for buildings that enables the execution of untrusted, multi-tenant applications in modern buildings. Playground is integrated with the Brick representation of the underlying buildings and features flexible and extensible access control and resource isolation mechanisms. These novel mechanisms of Playground avoid the intensive manual effort required to deploy building apps safely.

The original paper on Playground was published in 2024 ACM/IEEE 15th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS) and was awarded as one of the best paper finalists🏆. Find the paper at https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10571633

What to Expect in this Tutorial?

  1. A quick walkthrough of the system design of Playground and relevant background
  2. Write your own toy building applications
  3. Use access control and isolation mechanism provided by Playground to deploy a building application safely on real buildings!

Tentative Schedule (A half day ~3hr event)

Topic Presenter Time
Introduction to Playground Xiaohan Fu 25min
Recap on Brick programming and NREL’s BuildingMOTIF [2] Gabe Fierro 20min
Lab session 1 — Write your own building app with Playground
Checkpoints:
  • Write a simple building application with Brick and Playground interfaces
    E.g. energy metering/zone control app
  • Write permission profile for the app and upload these apps to Playground.
  • (optional) Write semantic sufficiency requirement of the app and check its compatibility with the Brick graph
 Xiaohan Fu and/or
Yihao Liu		 50min
BREAK 20min
Lab session 2 — Regulate building apps with various policies
Checkpoints:
  • Design permission profiles of users in the system
  • Define resource constraints and regulating policies
  • Install previously written and uploaded apps to playground and play with it
 Xiaohan Fu and/or
Yihao Liu		 60min
(optional) discussions and feedback ~